UniCoRN: Unified Cognitive Signal ReconstructioN bridging cognitive signals and human language

Nuwa Xi, Sendong Zhao, Haochun Wang, Chi Liu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu


Abstract
Decoding text stimuli from cognitive signals (e.g. fMRI) enhances our understanding of the human language system, paving the way for building versatile Brain-Computer Interface. However, existing studies largely focus on decoding individual word-level fMRI volumes from a restricted vocabulary, which is far too idealized for real-world application. In this paper, we propose fMRI2text, the first open-vocabulary task aiming to bridge fMRI time series and human language. Furthermore, to explore the potential of this new task, we present a baseline solution, UniCoRN: the Unified Cognitive Signal ReconstructioN for Brain Decoding. By reconstructing both individual time points and time series, UniCoRN establishes a robust encoder for cognitive signals (fMRI & EEG). Leveraging a pre-trained language model as decoder, UniCoRN proves its efficacy in decoding coherent text from fMRI series across various split settings. Our model achieves a 34.77% BLEU score on fMRI2text, and a 37.04% BLEU when generalized to EEG-to-text decoding, thereby surpassing the former baseline. Experimental results indicate the feasibility of decoding consecutive fMRI volumes, and the effectiveness of decoding different cognitive signals using a unified structure.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.741
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13277–13291
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.741
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.741
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nuwa Xi, Sendong Zhao, Haochun Wang, Chi Liu, Bing Qin, and Ting Liu. 2023. UniCoRN: Unified Cognitive Signal ReconstructioN bridging cognitive signals and human language. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 13277–13291, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
UniCoRN: Unified Cognitive Signal ReconstructioN bridging cognitive signals and human language (Xi et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.741.pdf
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